Jewish Leader: Obama Is Most Hostile President to Israel

Ronald Kessler reporting from Washington, D.C. — Barack Obama’s policies and speeches position him as “the most hostile president to Israel ever,” Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, tells Newsmax.

President Obama has been “relentlessly pressuring Israel while applying virtually almost no pressure on the Palestinian Authority to fulfill its written obligations,” says Klein, whose organization of 30,000 members is the oldest pro-Israel group in the country.

Obama’s dismissive attitude toward Israel came out when Obama referred to the country in an interview as “one of our closest allies,” Klein notes.

“Every president has referred to Israel as the U.S.’s closest ally, never merely as one of its close regional allies,” he says. “Who does he believe is a closer ally — Egypt? Saudi Arabia? Turkey?”

Klein says Obama also outrageously dismissed the expression of Israeli concern at the lack of a red line placed by the world on Iran in its scheme to obtain nuclear weapons capacity as “noise.”

Klein says Obama’s antipathy to Israel has come out with some of his appointments, such as Salam Al-Marayati to represent the U.S. government at a human rights conference to be held in Poland by the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe. In 1993, Al-Marayati signed a statement condemning the establishment of Israel as “unjust” and "a crime." He vowed to “work to overturn the injustice.”

After the 9/11 attacks, Marayati said on a radio show in Los Angeles, “We should put the State of Israel on the suspect list” of possible 9/11 perpetrators. He later said the remark “gave regrettable and unintended offense to Jewish Americans.”

But contrary to popular impression, Israel and the economy are not the major concerns of American Jews in this election. Instead, Klein says, social issues such as abortion are driving Jews to favor President Obama.

“When I speak to Jews and ask them why they are supporting Obama, among those who are, they talk to me about abortion, they talk to me about women’s issues,” Klein says. “It seems that a significant proportion of Jews surprisingly are more interested in abortion and issues of that nature than they are about Israel and even more than they are about the economy.”

While support for Obama has slipped, American Jews are likely to vote to re-elect Obama by a margin of better than two to one over Mitt Romney, according to an American Jewish Committee national survey in September.

Sixty-five percent said they support Obama, 24 percent support Romney, and 10 percent said they were undecided. When asked preferences, the undecided voters split 63 percent for Obama and 27 percent for Romney.

According to exit polls in the 2008 election, American Jews voted for Obama over Senator John McCain by a margin of 78 percent to 22 percent.

Last July, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, told a host of Jewish Life Television that American Jews should vote for Obama because he supports abortion on demand and forcing religious employers to provide contraception coverage with no co-pay.

Mitt Romney believes the Supreme Court should overturn its Roe v. Wade decision, which he calls a case of “blatant judicial activism,” and allow the states to determine abortion policy.

“I find most Jews to be willfully uninformed about the Israel issues,” says Klein. “They really are not fully aware of the pressure that Obama puts on Israel to make one-sided concessions and to look to indefensible borders as an area where Israel should end up withdrawing to.”

Nor are Jews concerned about Obama’s close association for 20 years with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. As noted in my story, "Video Shows Obama Hoodwinked America," Obama called Wright a “great leader.”

“This is a man who attacked Israel and whites in America, and the president thinks he is a great man,” Klein says. “And gave an award for lifetime achievement to Louis Farrakhan.”

As a child of survivors of the Holocaust, Klein says he was particularly offended by Obama’s Cairo speech when he compared the suffering of Palestinians to the Nazis’ murder of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust.

“I found this to be an abominable, odious, and ridiculously false analogy,” he says.

While Klein’s parents’ survived, his father lost his eight brothers and sisters and all his aunts and uncles in Nazi concentration camps. Klein’s mother lost half her family.

“After four years of a bad economy and proof that Obama is hostile to Israel and ignores radical Islamic regimes like Iran, and not implementing the full sanctions and refusing to impose a red line on Iran’s development of nuclear weapons, Jews still will vote for Obama,” Klein says. “I find this painful.”

Ronald Kessler is chief Washington correspondent of Newsmax.com. He is the New York Times best-selling author of books on the Secret Service, FBI, and CIA. Read more reports from Ronald Kessler — Click Here Now.

Ronald Kessler reporting from Washington, D.C. — Barack Obama’s policies and speeches position him as “the most hostile president to Israel ever,” Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, tells Newsmax.